


What You Became

by nockingarrows



Category: K-pop, Pentagon (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daisy (Music Video), Gen, Other, main character gender neutral, references to past relationship with mc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27345271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nockingarrows/pseuds/nockingarrows
Summary: I could tell you I was sorry, but that would have been a lie. No matter how much I loved you, even if I didn’t know it at the time, I wouldn’t have made a different decision. I had to know. In the name of everything I stood for and who I was, it was an inevitable ending.[OR: Pentagon's Daisy MV but with **plot**]
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	What You Became

**Author's Note:**

> my friends can tell you that i was very upset that the daisy mv wasn't more of a story mv, so i decided to **give it plot**. this is much longer than i wanted it to be, as everything i write is lmao. please enjoy! as always kudos and comments are appreciated <3

**To you**

I could tell you I was sorry, but that would have been a lie. No matter how much I loved you, even if I didn’t know it at the time, I wouldn’t have made a different decision. I had to know. In the name of everything I stood for and who I was, it was an inevitable ending. 

But before you accuse me of cruelty (though I wouldn’t deny it), let me clarify one thing. If you sent me, as I am now, down those stairs and into that dusty little room with your hand in mine to do it all again, I don’t think I could. After all these years, you’ve become a rose-tinted memory, a smile and a hug frozen in time. I miss you. I don’t think, if I held your hand again, I could ever let it go. 

Time can’t be turned back, though. I did what I did, and I can’t say that I regret it. But there was a price to pay. Out of all the things I could apologize for, that is it. I’m sorry you couldn’t see what you became—what I turned you into. I wish I could tell you, and I wish that you were here to listen. 

\--

**Violet**

If you were here, I’d start with the one I would eventually know as Kang Hyunggu. I didn’t think that I’d actually be forced to _watch_ , though I’m not sure why. I’d spent so long researching this particular method, thinking it was the easiest one, that I’d figured the ritual would be it. Ha. You always told me I was a fool for searching for shortcuts. That it took losing you to make me realize that you were right all along...the irony doesn’t escape me. 

I saw you in his eyes, in the way he laughed, though he was laughing at his misery and you laughed at the way my hair wouldn’t stay in a ponytail properly when I put it up. He was the first one I saw after the ritual, and the smell of smoke lingered in my nostrils as I watched the swinging lantern above his head and tried to figure out where I was. Who he was. You would have laughed at how long it took me to realize that he wasn’t you. 

Or at least, he wasn’t the whole you. 

The next thing I noticed was the water, pooling around my ankles, though I couldn’t really feel it. My body was nothing more than smoke and shadow—the aftermath of the ritual, which had plunged my mind into wherever it had trapped you. I knelt and, with smoke billowing from my fingers, splashed the water. Some part of me still believed that this was happening in my imagination, and when I woke all I would need to do was pluck the eternal daisy and leave. 

Then he—the man several meters away from me, with eyes both like and unlike yours—turned from the overflowing sink and faced me. His eyes widened and he stumbled a few steps back.

“What are you?!”

_What._

I looked down at myself again, suddenly registering how frightening I looked. I had naively thought the ritual would make me invisible if it were going to make me watch. I should have known better. The price for the ritual was _sacrifice_ —what more could I have given of myself than turning myself into a monster?

“A figment of your imagination,” I found myself saying, just to calm him down. 

Hyunggu—forgive me if I just call him that now; it’s habit—blinked at me from his place by the sink. He was drenched, I now saw, and his eyes were red and bloodshot.

“What about you?” I asked, even though I knew. “Who are you?”

“I...don’t know.” 

“How much do you remember?” I pressed. I think some part of me felt it then: the guilt that should have been my reaction from the very beginning. 

“There was someone...someone who…” Hyunggu’s fist made its way to his heart, spreading its fingers until his palm pressed against the soaked fabric of his shirt. “...someone I loved. We made promises and they...they couldn’t keep them.”

“What kind of promises?” I whispered. They ran through my head like frightened deer, fleeing from me. _I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. I promise to always make you happy. I promise to stand by you forever. I promise to ease your pain._

Sometimes I think about them now and wonder when the line blurred. I befriended you to help me, and loved you because you loved me. When did that start to hurt?

“I don’t remember,” answered Hyunggu, shaking me out of my thoughts.

“Then let me help you,” I said, except this time it wasn’t me. Something else pushed those words out of my throat. For a moment I felt sick, as if someone had socked me in the gut. Then I remembered the ritual, and deflated. This was part of the sacrifice. I was the antagonist here, and I would make my own demise unless luck—and you, or your fragments—were on my side. 

**\--**

**Black**

Not seconds after I explained it all to Hyunggu through shaking lips that I tried my best to close, he lunged at me. You would have been proud; he certainly retained your speed. I retreated, moving swiftly through the water in a way my human self never could, and then I sank. I thought that would be all I needed to escape, but Hyunggu was stubborn like you. He dove in after me, and as I continued to sink with all the weight my mind could muster (and the ritual, thankfully, listened), he stared me down. 

I thought, in that moment, that he didn’t quite have your eyes after all.

Then my back hit solid ground so hard I nearly lost consciousness. When I blinked my vision back into place, I was no longer underwater. Kang Hyunggu was nowhere to be seen. Instead, high above me, a different figure hung suspended in the air. 

I stood and wisps of my shadowy body—or perhaps the water that still clung to me in heavy droplets—dripped onto the grey stone beneath my feet. The figure, which had been quite still when I arrived, stirred and then slowly drifted to the ground. He was tall, far taller than you had been, and his back was straight as he faced the wall. 

“Who’s there?” he asked. His voice was different from Hyunggu’s and yours—lower, with a touch of gravel and gravity. 

I wanted to befriend him, to brush his tousled hair with a small comb like I did yours. I wanted to pick him up in my car and roll down the window to greet him: “Hello, Koh Shinwon! Need a ride?” I didn’t want to tell him that he would need to kill me to escape this place, as I now knew the ritual would make me do. 

“Just a friend, passing through,” I lied instead. “Are you alright?”

“I…” Shinwon looked at his hands, then at his feet. “I float in this place.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, though the sound was tinny even to my ears. “You do. When did you discover that you had that gift?”

“I’m not sure. Before this…”

He paused, squinting at me, and I hurried to fill the space.

“I have a gift too. Or at least I will, once I leave here. It’s been a little pipe dream of mine since I was a child, and now it’s finally going to be real.”

“What gift?”

“Healing. Immortality,” I said softly. I couldn’t help the smile that reached my face—the smile of a child’s dream coming true at last. “Have you heard of the eternal daisy?”

He blinked innocent lamb’s eyes at me and I felt a brief rush of blissful relief. He didn’t remember that room with its smell of old dust and damp earth. He didn’t remember me standing there with my hand against your side, stabilizing you until the air shifted and I moved. He didn’t remember the push, the fall, the flames engulfing you whole. He didn’t remember that I’d stood there and watched in dead silence and reminded myself that it would all be worth it. My body had been weak and dying, and its future would now be strong and forever, as I’d always imagined it being. 

He didn’t know I couldn’t make myself feel sorry for it. 

“I don’t think—” started Shinwon.

Then, the sound of crashing waves startled both of us. My eyes widened as I looked past Shinwon to a rustle of movement behind him. A figure—sopping wet, dripping streaks of water that ran across the grey stone toward us—stumbled to its feet and then straightened. 

“You—”

“Come and get me,” I taunted him with the ritual’s words. 

I then, as myself, turned from Kang Hyunggu and rammed my shadowy body into the wall of the glass case around us with as much force as I could muster. I imagined myself light as a feather, as nothing as air, and only breathed when I felt the ritual let me through.

\--

**Yellow**

A rainshower of glass sent me tumbling into a golden room lit with flickering candles. I landed briefly on an elaborately embroidered couch near the wall, sank with my shadowy feet, and then sprung up to pad to the dark figure curled fetal-like on the ground. I stood above him for a moment, waiting for him to stir as Shinwon had, but he continued to clutch himself tighter, shoulders shaking. 

Crying. 

I knelt and reached out a hand dripping shadows before I recoiled, remembering that I wasn’t human anymore. Or at least, I wasn’t human _here_. 

“What happened to you?” I murmured. 

I had to lean in to hear his response, in a voice so low it was almost a rumble. 

“You can’t help.”

“What makes you think that’s what I’m here for?” I said with a small laugh.

“Then what is it?”

A bright, teary brown eye shifted into view from under his black clothing. It blinked up at me, widening a little, but seemed resigned to whatever fate I had in store for him. The rest of him still wouldn’t move. I wondered, momentarily, why you had never shown this vulnerability to me. Then I remembered what I’d done and knew you’d made the right choice. 

“I’m here to listen,” I answered. I could feel the ritual trying to claw its way up my throat to give me away, but I clamped my jaw shut. _Not yet._ After feeling it a few times, I could sense it coming. Perhaps the strength of my belief made me capable of holding it back, at least for a while. 

“I don’t have anything to say,” Adachi Yuto, whose face I could now see in full, told me. 

“Then tell me something that doesn’t matter.”

“Like?”

“Whether the ground is comfortable.”

A small chuckle. “It isn’t. If I were to choose, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Where would you be, then?” 

“There was a dusty room at the bottom of a flight of stairs at the back of a little shop. Something...something there was very important to me. I want to go back to retrieve it.”

I shuddered. I knew that dusty room well; the body that really belonged to me, with its human heart and human lungs, laid on its soot-covered floor. Beside it, your body was long gone, as were the flames that took it from you. In your place, a sprig was growing. 

“Do you remember what it was? The important thing?” 

“It…” Yuto’s hands curled into fists, “...was a feeling.”

“A feeling?”

Tears made their way down his face in slow motion. “It _burned_.”

“The fire.”

He shook his head vehemently, as if I had missed the point. “I told you that you wouldn’t be able to help me.” He curled back into himself, tucking his head into his chest. “I shouldn’t have thought...”

He trailed off with a sigh and turned away from me. I stared at his back in mild disbelief—really, as if you’d ever acted so childish in front of me—and then reached out again. But this time he had already seen me, so I wasn’t afraid. I gently draped my arm over his back the way I used to do with you, when we would talk about our worries by the window as it rained outside. He flinched a little, and then, like you, all the fight drained out of him. He nestled into me and buried his head in my chest, crying so hard that his heaving shoulders shook me along with them like the ripple of a shallow tide. 

I would have stayed there forever, cradling this fragile part of you that I’d never known existed, if it hadn’t been for a new sound. Footsteps, rattling down the hall. I looked up from where I rested my head between Yuto’s shoulders and saw them: two dark figures. One pointed and the other began to run toward me. 

Slowly, I untangled myself from Yuto’s protesting form and retreated, my shadow-light feet propelling me easily to the back of the room. Hyunggu was quick when he ran, though, and I dodged a sharp flash of metal from his hands. He had your aim, too. 

“Do you honestly think you can run forever?” he snapped at me. 

“If I need to.”

My eyes flitted from side to side, searching, and then landed on what I needed. As I dove, another flash passed my periphery. This one looked to be a knife. Some part of me found hilarity in the fact that the ritual had chosen to tell the part of you that could fight that it needed to kill me. 

“What are you even fleeing from?” he snapped as I knelt in front of the golden couch. “You told me yourself—you’re not even real! The real you is still alive and will be alive when you leave here, whether you live in this reality or not. But if you live and are still living once you’ve seen all of us, _we’ll_ be dead! Us, and whatever’s left of the man you loved.”

“Whoever said I loved him?” I retorted, suddenly standing up straight. “What do you know?!”

“I know that the eternal daisy won’t make you happy,” he spat. “I know that when you come out of this place alone and that daisy is all you have left of us, you’ll feel sorry.”

At the time, I laughed. I was the mind of a weak and feverish child who had been weak and feverish since birth. I was dying. Why would I feel sorry about saving my life the only way I knew how, when the man I’d sacrificed had said he would do anything to make me happy? I wouldn’t even be killing him—just splitting him into pieces of himself, each to live their own lives without him. Wasn’t that enough?

If I’d asked Hyunggu, he might have told me something else. I might have heard it in your voice. I might have listened. But I was a monster with a one-track mind, and I had found a hole under the couch. I slipped through without a sound, without a response, not even looking back. 

\--

**Blue**

The musty smell of rain reached me first. I heard the pattering next, swift and heavy like a thousand tiny arrows plummeting to the ground. It was a good comparison for how I felt then: an arrow that had flown for so long that a harrowing turn towards the earth felt alien and wrong. 

_Had I been in love with you? Was I still?_

I asked myself those questions as I sat crumpled beside the charred and curled remains of an upturned car. By the time he reached me, my head was in my hands. 

He—Jung Wooseok—was the first of your pieces to come to me instead of the other way around. When I looked up, he had his hand outstretched. I hesitated and then took it, allowing him to pull me to my feet. 

“You’re not afraid of me?” I asked as he appraised me with his eyes. Something in them made me feel as if the reason he wasn’t frightened was that he couldn’t be bothered with anything at all. In hindsight, it amuses me. All that time I thought I was the one who didn’t love you—but there must have been some part of you that was as indifferent to me as a stranger on the street. 

Wooseok shrugged. “Thought you might have been caught in the wreck, but you don’t look injured.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Good.”

He then hunched his shoulders and turned on his heel, walking away from me. I bit back my surprise and just watched him go. I then turned back to the wreckage of the car, kicked back part of the frame, and climbed into what remained of the driver’s seat. I placed shaking hands onto the steering wheel, dug my foot into what remained of the acceleration, and willed it to work. 

A small sputtering rattled to life under my feet and then died out. Alarm bubbled up into my throat—was the ritual no longer listening to me? Had it discovered that without it, I was powerless? Or was I winning against the pieces of you, and the ritual was simply upping the ante to measure up? 

I couldn’t be sure. But what I did know, then, was that I heard voices, weaving in and out of the pitter-patter of the rain. The alarm I’d felt climbed out of my throat and pressed angry fingers to my lips, gluing my mouth shut as I dove under the hunk of metal and plastic that used to make up the dashboard of the car. 

“Yeah, right there.” Wooseok sounded as unfazed as ever. 

“I don’t see anyone,” Hyunggu said, precise and clipped. 

I could almost hear Wooseok shrug. “Then search somewhere else. I’ve told you everything I know.” He stumbled over the last word a little, and then I heard a small scuffle, the sound of wet jackets rustling and boots skidding across the damp floor. 

“Did that shadow do this?!” 

“Don’t touch me.”

Hyunggu sighed through his teeth—a muffled, annoyed sound. “Can you at least tell me if it was the one that crashed the car?”

“I don’t know. I woke up in the damned wreckage. When I got out of the car, I found it sitting there. We exchanged words. Now, will you let go of my wrist? Burn stings like a bitch.”

A pause. 

“What did it tell you?” Hyunggu’s voice had lowered; I could barely hear him now.

“That it wasn’t injured. Then I left.”

“You should be careful. Some people don’t deserve your help.”

“And some people talk too much.” More scuffling, and then a growl. “I said, _let go_.”

“What would you say if I told you that _that thing_ is going to be the death of us? It’s got to visit each of our prisons, each of our little scenes, and once it gets through all of us, it’ll be over! Would you help me find it, then?”

“You’re saying that if I let that worm thing—” I flinched. “—live, that in less than an hour, this will all be over?”

“Yes.”

The rain had soaked through my back by then, leaving me numb with phantom sweat and the feeling that the water had reached beneath my skin and frozen me alive. If I thought hard, maybe it was fear. 

Then Wooseok spoke, nonchalant. “Good.”

“Good?!” Hyunggu repeated. I was feeling quite the same, though for different reasons. 

“Good. It’s about time.”

“Wait—hey! Where are you going?”

“Away. Somewhere to wait. Maybe I’ll grab something to drink.”

“You’re insane.”

“Maybe I am. Better than whatever I was before this. Have fun finding your shadow.”

“Fine!”

“Fine.”

“Fine. Good riddance.”

Something—probably another piece of scrap metal broken and twisted in the wreckage, landed with a clang above my head, slanted over some wiring. The point of it dug into my back, a pinprick of pain, but I stayed still until Hyunggu’s furious footsteps rushed past me. I then reached out a hand, slowly, and leaned it against the acceleration. 

_Please, give me another chance._

Something broke in the back of my head and then I was surging forward toward a distant light. Behind me, I thought I heard a shout. 

\--

**Green**

The distant light was from a setting sun, and when I opened my eyes I found myself under it, shoulders dappled orange-gold, surrounded with the meandering stalks of weeds pushing their way out of the dry earth. I stood from where I had fallen, brushed off my soiled knees, and made my way toward the leather couch in the center of it all. 

I stopped short when I saw it for what it was. This was not the ornate throne from Yuto’s candlelit room, but a couch pulled directly from my memories. Our memories. Though there was now a different man sitting there, an image surfaced in my mind of you sitting where he was, flicking through channels on the TV, with me just a few feet away scanning my research. You were fact-checking for me in that soft voice of yours, ironing out the impracticalities in my plans. You were always about things that worked, things that were solid and true. 

That’s probably why you were the smarter one of us. I only knew it too late. 

I glanced to the side and sucked in a breath. The ritual...it had plucked out just the right details, the ones that would pull at my heartstrings. Your cello was there, leaning against the other mismatched items of our time together. The tarp you’d used to hide us from the pouring rain when we’d decided to go camping in the middle of storm season. Fishing rods that were still shiny because you liked the way they looked too much to ever try them. Of course they weren’t the ones we’d left in your childhood home, but they were close enough that they struck me as such, and that’s what mattered. 

I guess I had stood there long enough for Yeo Changgu to notice me, because in the end he was the one to call me over. 

“Want to sit?” He patted the spot on the couch beside him, and the movement refocused my vision enough for me to remember that he wasn’t you. 

I inclined my head ever so slightly and made my way through the brush. He scooted over and I settled down cross-legged, as you once would have. I expected him to keep watching me, but he simply leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes, a small smile playing on his lips. 

Curiosity caught the better of me, and I leaned back as well before asking, “What are you thinking about?” 

His eyes flickered open, then closed again. “Happiness.”

“Are you happy?”

“Maybe not now, but I’d like to be.” One eye opened, peering at me. “Have you ever been in love?”

“Maybe not now, but I’d like to be,” I parroted him, and he laughed.

“It’s not too late. You could always go back.”

My laugh soured. “Back to what?”

“Home. You’re not of this world, so you must be from somewhere else.”

“Ha, astute.”

“You know, I had a home once. Just outside of it, there was this lake. Someone took me across it once, or tried to, just because I was crazy enough to want to play a song where no one could reach me. We rented a kayak and paddled out toward this tiny rock island where I was supposed to set up, but halfway through we got so tired that I just pulled out my notes where we were. Played my song right there, while some of those big white pelicans flew over us. You know what that is?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, which was good, because I couldn’t. A feeling—which I would now call heartbreak—wrapped itself like a vise around my throat. 

“Serendipity,” Changgu continued with that soft smile. “A good omen for falling in love.”

“Did you fall in love then?” I managed. In my mind, a light breeze wrapped around my shoulders. You sat across from me with your cello leaned against your shoulder and your eyes closed. You didn’t need those notes—never had. 

His smile faded a little. “I don’t remember. Whoever I was before this...he’s gone now.”

Which was, of course, on me. The sudden urge not to be there on that couch, or even in this scene at all, overtook me. As I clambered to my feet, Changgu’s eyes shot open and he grabbed my hand. It felt like yours, warm and calloused, which only made me want to escape more. I wrestled out of his grasp and turned back the way I’d come. 

“Wait.”

Something in his voice stopped me. It shouldn’t have, but it reminded me of you. 

“What?”

“I need to show you something, before you go.”

His eyes were pleading, so much like yours that helpless acquiescence stifled my dread like a too-heavy coat. I found myself nodding and taking his hand, letting him lead me through the maze of knee-high weeds and artifacts from our past to the side of a large wooden shed. He worked deft fingers on the lock and I wondered if he remembered using those same fingers to play the piano for me on my birthday or press comforting circles into the small of my back. 

The door creaked open as Changgu leaned his weight against it, and I slid through to land on a bed of soft, pillowy grass. I blinked and then glanced back, where he was nodding encouragingly. I then turned back to the field of blooming daisies in front of me. The farther into the room I walked, the more each flower seemed to turn toward me, yearning. 

Or maybe they sensed my own yearning, the way my weak limbs ached. I knelt and reached out to one of the flowers, cupping the white petals in my fingers. The shadows that dripped off of my hands made a stark backdrop for each daisy as I held them. 

“Are any of those good?” Changgu asked from behind me.

“What?” I murmured. 

“Don’t you need one of them, for the ritual?”

My blood ran cold and I turned back to face him. “ _What?_ Who told you that?” 

Changgu frowned. “A man came through here to warn me that I might have company soon. He told me that you would need the daisies soon—that you should see them.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall, dark hair, sort of…” He made a vague gesture around his head, and I realized that my question meant nothing. I knew who was searching for me; which one of them had been here first didn’t matter. 

“Where is he now?” I demanded. “Can you keep him at bay?”

Alarm flashed over Changgu’s face, contorting the soft smile that had graced his features. He dipped his head and vanished behind the door of the shed, which slammed behind him. I stood in the silence that lingered after it, barely remembering to breathe, before I dropped to my knees and started harvesting daisies as fast as I could. I was a shadow, and therefore could not hide the flowers in my clothing, so I thrust them into my hair and squeezed the rest into tight fists, though I was careful not to tear the petals. 

You were always the smartest of us. Without you, I doubted myself. I couldn’t remember anything about the ritual needing me to keep a daisy on my person, but then again my research hadn’t warned me about this part at all. I hadn’t known that while your pieces were tested, I would be too. Thus I had to be careful; I couldn’t let this slip through my hands when I was this close. 

I was so caught up in my collecting that I never heard the footsteps, the snap of the match. What I did hear, though, was the roar and crackle, and then the _smell_ , accosting me just as it had in that dusty grey room. I froze in my tracks and then snapped my head up to see that the field around me was engulfed in a ring of fire, blocking my way to the door.

“Hey!!” I cried at it, edging as close as I could. “Hey, come back!”

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, there was no response from Yeo Changgu, and the flames were surging toward me fast. Their heat was dulled in my shadow state, but I was starting to feel it: white-hot, overwhelming. 

I fell to my knees, though this time I was no longer harvesting. The daisies felt wet in my clenched palms, but I didn’t dare open them for fear of seeing what I’d done. What if I really needed them? No, ignorance was bliss. I needed to—

Wait. I pressed my fingers to the ground. It felt far too springy, almost...hollow?

“Down,” I hissed. “Down. Down!”

 _I was heavy, heavier than any living human, indestructible and inflammable._ The heat suddenly relented and I fell like a stone. 

\--

**Magenta**

I waited to land, but never hit the ground. For each of the other scenes, I’d moved from one place to the next or opened and closed my eyes to find myself somewhere else. This time, though, I fell and simply kept falling. Wind rushed past me, pulling my hair and the shadows and everything else that clung to me back the way I’d come. 

I kept my eyes closed, still expecting to eventually reach the ground or at least slow down, when I felt it. I felt you. Your fingers brushed the bottom of my chin, tipping it up. Around us, the wind suddenly faltered, and my hair fell in wild tangles around my head. I could feel your breath, and then you reached out to tuck a hair behind my ear. 

“May I?” 

Your fingers then brushed my lips and I remembered a very different scene: you clutching a folder of notes you’d compiled for me in your hands, looking very small on my front porch. You’d wanted to say more, you told me later, but you were out of breath from chasing me after class as I’d left in a rush. So all you asked was _May I?_ in that sad voice of yours that already believed you’d lost. I’d blinked stupidly at you in the doorway, but then I’d come down and been the one to tip your head up myself. 

The wind had begun to pick up again, and before I knew it, I’d nodded. Your hand was back at my cheek, a gentle touch pulsing with your heartbeat. As my fingers reached up to enfold yours, your lips caught mine. 

I chased the softness of them, suddenly aware of a heaviness in my chest, and then realized. You tasted of faint cinnamon from your love for desserts and felt pillowy smooth against my lips because you moisturized yours like a fiend—this wasn’t you. He wasn’t you, but the thought only made me sadder. I went for a second kiss and then a third, though that one was only a peck. 

“You’ve realized,” he said when I opened my eyes. We were enveloped in rich pink-purple and golden light that lit his silvery eyes and hair like a sunset. He was beautiful, but I felt with sudden certainty that he paled compared to you. 

“So have you,” I said with a dry laugh. My lips ached along with my heart; this piece of you _remembered_. “Might as well try killing me now.”

His immaculate face twisted. “You don’t think I care. Am I really that different from him?” He reached for my face again, and even as I told myself that I shouldn’t, I leaned into his touch as he pulled me in. His lips bruised and I made a pained sound against him. 

“You—”

“Did you love me at all, when I was him?” He was so close that I could see that his eyes weren’t silvery at all; they were just teary, intense and piercing. I shivered. 

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“I...don’t know.”

“You didn’t. You just let him love you until it broke him into pieces, and now this—” He gestured at himself. “— is what’s left of him. Isn’t that right?”

I opened my mouth to respond, couldn’t think of anything to say, and closed it. He glared back at me, fury rending his mouth into a flat crimson line. The hand he’d used to cup my face dropped to his side, reaching into his pocket. What emerged shattered my speechlessness with a flash of visceral horror. 

“No—”

I lifted my hands and finally processed my empty palms—human palms, free of the shadows that I’d lost when I’d fallen through the floor of Changgu’s shed. There was something eerie about my transformation happening now, as I met this particular version of you, but I couldn’t focus on that. I reached frantic hands up to feel my hair, which had become the thick human hair of the real world, but there were no flowers there, no petals, nothing that would secure my future. 

And in Yan An’s hand was a perfect, whole daisy. Before my astonished eyes, his fingers closed in on the flower and began to squeeze—to crush it. 

“No!!”

I tried to lunge forward but stumbled as a gust of wind sent me careening off balance. There was no floor on which to land so I just kept falling, though now I was also screaming. Yan An’s form remained above me, still and ethereal, taunting me in smaller and smaller sizes until I could no longer see him anymore. 

\--

**Red**

I don’t remember when I stopped falling. What I do remember is that there was no longer a need to scream, and once I’d processed that, I found myself leaning against a wall with my legs braced against the railing of a stairwell. I glanced down at my hands, noting that my transformation from Yan An’s scene hadn’t been a fluke; I was still human, dressed in ghostly white. 

I sat up and winced—being human also meant that my body remembered falling for what felt like hours—and then froze. From somewhere below me, far past the spiral of the staircase, voices floated up to me. I started to move toward them on careful tiptoes. 

“...worry...the time will come.” The first voice had an unfamiliar huskiness to it. It was accompanied by the clinking sound of metal against metal, then the crunch of chewing. 

The next voice I did know. 

“You should be more concerned.” Hyunggu’s anger had drained, replaced with a tired sort of passive aggression. His words were followed with a long sigh. 

“Why?” the first voice asked cheerily. “You don’t think it’ll work?”

“Not the way you want it to.”

I paused at the turn of the stairwell before my figure revealed itself completely. Peeking around the railing, I could see a long wooden table decked out for a feast. Hyunggu sat with his back facing me, his platinum-blue hair long dry and hanging like a lazy cloud around his head. He hadn’t eaten, and was merely poking at his food with a single tong of his fork like he expected it to jump into his mouth. 

Meanwhile, at the other end of the table sat a man who had already made it through half of his meal. Candlelight dappled his face and dark, formal attire so that he looked as if he had been painted into the room. Hyunggu looked decidedly foreign—an intruder in Yang Hongseok’s space. 

But the true intruder was, of course, still me. I crouched at my spot on the stairwell, scanning the room for my next exit. I only needed to make it to the next room and meet your last piece, and then I’d be free. This was the last place I could afford to make mistakes or get distracted (the feeling of Yan An’s lips bruising mine was enough of that). 

“You can’t know what it’ll do to you. That’s not something you can predict, just because you’ve heard me talk about it,” Hyunggu continued. 

“As if you’re not an expert on the matter.”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m an expert! I could know everything in the world and it could still catch me off guard. Everyone in this damned place, every one of you. You think too little of it.”

I tried to block them out of my mind as I found what I needed: another stairwell, heading up, on the other side of the room. All I needed to do was cross the hall unseen and make a run for it. I leaned against the railing and closed my eyes, reaching out for that broken feeling at the back of my head that I’d gotten when the ritual was on my side. 

_Make me unseen. I am the wind at their back, a forgotten memory. If they see me, I am a figment of their imagination._

I made the turn into Hongseok’s line of sight, chanting it to myself. _I was nothing, just a breeze, a ghost of the past._ If he saw me, he’d assume he hadn’t. I made my way to the floor and edged along the wall, quickening my step through sections where the candles and chandelier threw their light. _I was an imagined movement in his periphery, wind rustling a curtain. I was—_

“Can I ask you where you got it?”

“The daisy?” 

I stopped dead in my tracks. The daisy! No—no. _I was invisible, I was nothing, I didn’t need it, I was a crack in the wall, I was—_

“Yeah. The flower. Whatever.”

“I told you. We’ve been searching each of our scenes, making sure that all of them weren’t lost in the chaos. We need one of them, after all.”

“Nice foresight.”

Hyunggu huffed. “Took a long ass time to put together, no thanks to you.” He paused, giving me time to suck in the breath I’d forgotten to take. _I was another piece of the wall, a flash..._

“Well, are you going to do it?”

“Take a breather, kid. Let me finish my steak. Not like we have a time limit.”

Hyunggu shook his fist—my eyes landed hungrily on the daisy’s white petals as they caught the candlelight. “It’s already here. We can’t wait.”

Hongseok swallowed and then laughed. “No patience these days, huh? Well, it’s your call.” 

He outstretched his hand and Hyunggu stood from his spot at the head of the table and strode with purposeful steps toward him, carrying the daisy dangling its head from a cup. I watched all of this happen as if in slow motion, each footfall of Hyunggu’s rattling in my chest like the beat of a drum, and then I made my decision. Another step from Hyunggu and I leapt from my place by the wall, reaching for the cup with very human fingers. The porcelain was cold and vindicating at my touch and as I skittered backwards, clutching the cup in my hands, I thought I’d won. 

Then I crumpled forward. The pain came second, spreading like wildfire through my body. The knife—the same one that Hyunggu had thrown at me in the second scene—slid out from the small of my back as if out of a sheath. I tried to cry out, to scream, but the only sound that came out of me was a small, wordless groan. Then the pain came again, this time to the back of my head.

My last thought was that if I’d been there with you, the real you, none of it would have happened. You were too smart for that. 

Then the world went black. 

\--

**White**

The real world came back to me frame by frame. First, I felt the ground beneath me, then I smelled the dust and mustiness of that little grey room, and then I saw the soot on my hands and all over my clothes. The memories came back then, too, and not just the ones from before. I remembered the flooded bathroom and the ritual’s words in my mouth and every weed and cup and metal shard I’d encountered after it. 

I knew I’d lost, but I didn’t want to face it. So I laid there with my face in the dirt, breathing soot, until a hand tapped my shoulder. I shuddered, though not very much, but enough for him to know I was alive. I protested a little, squeezing into myself, as he put all his weight into pulling me up. But eventually, I relented. 

When I finally faced your last piece, I found him to be the most like you. There was an old sadness in his eyes, almost like he was a soul displaced in time. He had disheveled dark hair and that sort of forceful smile that was both gentle and hard at the same time. It was the one you wore when you wanted something you shouldn’t have, or when you were disappointed.

“Leave me alone,” I whispered. 

“As if I could.”

“I don’t…” I looked at my hands. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Then don’t say anything,” said Lee Hwitaek. 

Over his shoulder, I could see the others that I’d freed from the ritual. They looked exactly as they had before, but now they helped each other, intertwining parts of my memory that had been separate before. Adachi Yuto and Jung Wooseok held each other up, Yuto’s face still tear-streaked and Wooseok still covered in scratches and burns. Yeo Changgu took Yan An’s hand when it was outstretched, and smiled a brilliant smile up at him as he did. Yang Hongseok had his arms crossed off to the side and kept refusing the jacket Kang Hyunggu was offering him while listening as Koh Shinwon whispered something in his ear. 

Hwitaek followed my gaze to the group and shook his head. “Don’t worry about them.”

“I wasn’t—”

His gaze hardened. “At least let me believe it. I don’t want to know if you don’t care.”

I started to protest before realizing that it was all empty, anyway. I’d still done what I’d done. I sighed and glanced down at Hwitaek’s feet, beside which a beautiful, pure-white daisy was still growing. It bloomed facing me, a mockery of all my efforts. I couldn’t pick it even if I wanted to; the fires that had made it would burn me alive, ending any semblance of life that I had left. 

“What will you do with it?” I asked softly.

Hwitaek looked down, seeming to notice the daisy for the first time. He bent down, plucked it from the ground, and twirled it in his fingers. Behind him, seven pairs of eyes watched his movement. 

He then turned and held it out to me. I could only blink, stunned to my core, as he smiled. 

“He would have wanted you to be happy, in the end,” he said. “But we’re meant for something different.”

They left shortly after that, all together, hand in hand. I don’t remember how long I stared after them, feeling suddenly as if I was the one whose soul had shattered into eight different pieces. When I looked down at the daisy in my hand, it didn’t feel much like a cure at all. 

\--

 **To them**

Hundreds of years later, I still remember the taste of it. I followed the instructions exactly, the folding of the petals before crushing them with a pestle, the single cup of boiling water, the sips in intervals. 

It tasted vile, to tell you the truth. Daisies aren’t meant to be consumed but admired, like many other things. 

I like to think that you would have been proud to know I went back to live in the house we used to share. Part of me thought that I wouldn’t be able to take it, constantly being reminded of you, but I felt that this was exactly its purpose. I couldn’t ever afford to forget what I’d done. Even if I couldn’t regret it, I owed it to you to at least live every breath I stole from you with the knowledge that I’d done so. 

I organized all your songs for you. You told me you always wanted to do that but just never had the time. I made little folders for them and play them sometimes, at least with what I can decipher. I’m pretty slow. You never did make as much progress with my learning as you thought. I apologize for that. I also apologize for badly playing those songs for the flower garden—and sometimes, I like to think, you. 

It’s been a lonely existence, I admit. I was never very good at making friends, especially after meeting you. I’d never needed one when we were together. Now I make myself pretty scarce. These days, I don’t think people would understand an immortal like you would have. 

My only company has been, well, you. I don’t know how long your pieces will live, and I doubt they do either, but every few centuries they remind me that they’re still kicking. Kang Hyunggu brings me bouquets and sits on my floor to tell me stories about everything he’s been doing. I don’t know if he does it to make me jealous or if he does it because he’s kinder than I imagined, but I don’t mind either way. He’s a teacher now—an elementary school teacher. He likes children, especially disadvantaged ones that he can help. It suits him. 

Adachi Yuto and Jung Wooseok visit me together. Yuto played guitar in a band for a while, from what I remember...I’m not sure what he’s doing now. Wooseok writes some songs, and also some stories. I mix them in with yours sometimes. You have different styles, but you would have liked his. You would have liked him. He tells me he dreams of being someone’s real little brother, and I think of you as I smile and tell him he can be mine. 

They forgive me, I think. Yan An doesn’t. He hasn’t visited me for some time, but when he does it’s usually to ask me for favors. He’s adjusted the least well to living in the real world; I suppose that’s what constantly falling for a lifetime before landing on solid ground does to a person. I take him places in your car and he spends the entire time in dead silence, staring out the window like he’s waiting for the world to tell him something. 

He does look happy though, usually when Yeo Changgu is around. Changgu is the most hopeful of them all. He lives in one of those little houses on wheels and parks it in places that he finds beautiful, which can be anywhere from a big parking lot to a cascading waterfall. He brings me pictures—some of which are poorly taken and some that aren’t. I’ve promised I’ll help him make a collage, and every time I hear his three little knocks on the door my spirit lifts. I once blamed him for setting that shed aflame; now, I don’t think it matters anymore. 

Yang Hongseok also travels the world, from what I remember. He visits me occasionally, bringing Koh Shinwon along for the ride. They bring me artifacts from their travels. That ornate lamp in my kitchen was theirs, as is my chandelier (you know I wouldn’t buy anything that fancy for myself), and the four tapestries in the living room. 

Shinwon often stays long after Hongseok’s curiosity has called him elsewhere. He helps me around the house, asking me about my life (and also why I lied to him, though I never respond). He’s sweet, though, and he sometimes makes me want to cry. 

Lee Hwitaek has never visited me. The last I saw of him was in that dusty room, holding out the daisy I made out of you. I wonder about him often. I hope he’s taking good care of the rest of you. 

I hope he’s happy in the end, too. 

**Author's Note:**

> yes everything i write is kinda sad. im sorry. but am i??
> 
> ps. if you guessed that the mc's love interest could be interpreted as jinho, you'd be correct. but i left it open so you could think of it as anyone ;)


End file.
